Digital video recorders (DVRs) are electronic devices which record video in a digital format to a digital storage device, such as, but not limited to a flash drive, a memory card, a solid state drive, a hard disk drive, or other storage devices as are known in the art. Some DVRs record video to a networked storage device, which may be referred to sometimes as “cloud storage”. Cloud DVRs, or, cDVRs, typically store the video in logical pools, where the physical storage may span multiple cloud storage devices.
As a result of various court decisions and other legal constraints imposed by various regulatory agencies in the U.S.A. and various other jurisdictions, one copy of a recorded content item per recording user needs to be maintained by a service provider in a cloud storage environment. For example, if one thousand users all record a television program broadcast at one particular time, then the service provider would need to store one thousand copies of the recorded television program in cloud storage.